Strategic Planning Committee Subcommittee on Academic Distinction

Focus Group Feedback

Continuing transformation of curriculum needs to represent more
than western perspectives.

More diverse perspectives.

Need to define who we are.

Emphasize services and intellectual climate.

Sense of institutional
identity is missing.

Failure to define academic distinction in a meaningful
way. What makes us unique are our upper division and graduate opportunities
because
lower division courses can be taken at many CC’s and TC’s.
Until we have our academic distinction piece defined (define our niche
of who
we are going to serve) it will be difficulty to match student enrollments
to what we offer because we can’t do everything.

Liberal Arts
appears as a service – just skills and nothing else.
What about liberal arts programs? Are we referring to general ed or
capstone classes? Liberal arts needs clarifying.

Measurement for departments
that don’t have accreditations?

Advising should be part of the
teaching load. Thesis advising. Projects. Include scholarship and in-service
activities.

Value out of the classroom experiences that enhances student
learning.

FTE could be a measure, but what about the work that doesn’t
appear in this such as advising, setting up a new program, etc. Non-FTE
duties.
Maintain small class size and increase market share seem to be conflicting
goals.

Need emphasis of scholarship.

Increase student’s in top-ten – how
do we do it?

How are students treated? Relates to retention.

Should try to improve,
not just maintain what we’re doing.

Goals and objectives should
be defined and should be measurable, otherwise meaningless.

General
education curriculum and CORE need to be looked at to ensure that students
are prepared for upper division work.

Measure learning efficiency – amount
of improvement per amount of learning time (course) with pre and post
testing.

Language is unambitious – needs to
be more specific and ambitious. Needs to be general enough not to be
prescriptive, but specific enough
to hold the institution responsible. Too vague; needs to be more specific.
Needs more teeth. Better language needs to be put in.

Appears like a wish
list.

Gaps regarding fiscal capacity and faculty workload.

Look at programs
in terms of the outcomes in terms of knowledge and skill of student.